6 ms·
Ok, so what is the solution you propose? Quit russian gaz cold turkey, today? Let people in Berlin freeze to death tonight? (Temperatures are 0 degrees C at nig
by dmitrygr 5y ago
Ok, so what is the solution you propose? Quit russian gaz cold turkey, today? Let people in Berlin freeze to death tonight? (Temperatures are 0 degrees C at night)
- weberer 5y agoMaybe stop shutting down all their nuclear plants? That would be a good first step.
- elaus 5y agoIn fact the German government also had that idea but it's not that simple. For once, you can't power the gas heaters in millions of households with electrical power. Also the plant operators would have to buy more uranium to continue operation – from Russia. So that kind of defeats the purpose. Sure, in retrospect it would have been better to invest even more money into renewables ten or twenty years ago, and to keep the nuclear power plants running for just a few more years. But you can't change the past so that discussion really leads to nothing for the current situation.
- hackerfromthefu 5y agoWhy not buy the uranium from e.g. Australia?
- this_user 5y agoExcept it would achieve absolutely nothing, because the vast majority of German homes are heated with oil or gas, not electricity. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_image/public/paragraphs/images/sources-heating-homes-2019.png?itok=GRj-bwn1 https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
- f_allwein 5y agoThe German minister for economics is visiting Qatar and the Emirates to talk about gas deals. He probably hates it, because he is in the Green Party.
- zibzab 5y agoAlso: Germany and US are in talks to lift the sanctions on Iran.
- axiosgunnar 5y agoYes. (nobody will freeze to death btw) And the reasoning is as follows: The actually morally necessary step is to establish a no-fly zone above Ukraine, enforced by force with NATO fighter jets and anti-aircraft systems. People (possibly rightfully) consider that this could lead to a WW3, possibly escalating into the usage of nuclear weapons. So far so good. So the bargain we do is basically "Ukraine, we would do everything for you, except for starting WW3, which you hopefully understand!". Really? Everything? Then quit Russian gas cold turkey! No matter how bad it will be (possibly fairly bad, I admit), it will still be less than WW3, which we bargain is the only thing that we don't want, everything else we would do for Ukraine. --- Can anybody put this into better words??
- unethical_ban 5y agoAgreed. In other words, the EU and US are at war with Russia by all means except direct fire. In a war, citizens will have to make sacrifices. This may include painful economic sacrifices.
- cute_boi 5y agoAlso, making sacrifices may looks good for a few days, but it will sure cause massive problem after that. And, the funny thing is many people indulge in so much luxury, I don't think it is even possible.
- Zpalmtree 5y agoI didn't sign up for a war
- unethical_ban 5y agoTake that up with the Russian president.
- jacquesm 5y agoSix million Jews didn't sign up for a war either. Nor did everybody on the 'allied' side in WWII. Nor did millions of Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghanis and so on. Millions of Ukrainians did not sign up for it. In fact: almost nobody except for the aggressors signed up for a war and even there that's debatable, usually it's only a few people at the top and then 100's of enablers and thousands to millions of conscripts, who didn't sign up for it either. But that doesn't mean that you won't end up in a war. The question is how much control you will have over the location of the battlefield. That's why the Americans had this 'fight them over there rather than here' doctrine going. Which given their lack of proximity always was a bit of misdirection, but that doesn't mean that the idea by itself does not have merit.
- robert_foss 5y agoThere are gas reserves in Germany that would last for months (I've seen 6-9month figures). Maybe cut gas purchase rate to 50%. That would give >1 year of runway.
- cute_boi 5y agoAgain, a mass oversimplification of current issue. Gas reserves wont last that much because human hoards if they know government are starting to use reserves. And, when politician act, they should think about future too. And, can they purchase gas at 50%? Are those written in deals?
- formerly_proven 5y agoHow do you hoard gas?
- sendfoods 5y agoGas reserves are at a historical low right now. I'm not sure why this misinformation keeps popping up. https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/erdgas-russland-ukraine-gasspeicher-100.html https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/erdgas-ru...
- sdfgdf 5y ago
- tluyben2 5y agoIt is not comfortable but inside houses you do not freeze to death like that. Sleep in your clothes, buy an electric heater next to your bed, get an electric blanket etc. I slept for quite a long time like that in the Netherlands because my mates squat building had no heat. That was during one of the coldest winters where all canals in Amsterdam were frozen enough to skate on. So yeah, not comfortable but freezing to death is not happening if you just take some care.
- whitepoplar 5y agoWhat about frozen pipes?
- gruez 5y agoKeeping a house warmed to 5°C is probably enough to keep the pipes from bursting, but uses much less gas than heating it to 21°C
- lifewallet_dev 5y agoHow's the electric heater and the electric blanket work without power?
- aerostable_slug 5y agoThe issue isn't electricity, it's the fact that German municipal heat plants run on natural gas. Replacing all of that with electrically-powered equipment (centralized or at the endpoints) takes time.
- lostmsu 5y agoAlso, heating energy consumption is among the top usages. So switching from gas would require large increase in electric generating capacity.
- UberFly 5y ago"if you just take some care". Now there's the problem. Some people are unable to suddenly migrate to igloo living.
- yayr 5y agointerestingly, most split air conditioning units also have a heating function. Usually, they convert 1kwh of electric energy into 4-5 times the heat energy. Heating with electricity is therefore something quite achievable and sometimes even economical. At current German electricity prices of 0,33 EUR/kwh electricity heating is currently cheaper than gas heating (currently at 0,20 EUR/kwh for new contracts - was at 0,04 before the crisis).
- MandieD 5y agoMost people here don’t have air conditioners - more than used to, but most of the people I know here (Nürnberg area) don’t. I feel like we temporarily dodged a bullet by sheer laziness - before the pandemic, we were all set to do the whole Energiesanierung with full KfW incentives, which would have required chucking out our oil furnace (replaced right before we bought the house a few years ago) for, most likely, natural gas. Instead, we are still sitting on 1.5 years of normal or possibly 3 years of very carefully used heating oil supply. Now, like everyone, we’re looking into heat pumps. Because we are still sitting on a year or two of heating oil, I think we shouldn’t be competing against our gas-heated neighbors for that changeover this year or next.
- kavalg 5y agoIt is more like 2-3 times, depending on the outside temparature and degrading rapidly below e.g. -5C. Also, there is a noticeable effect on quality of life (noise, sometimes uncomfortable air currents).
- pfortuny 5y agoJust honesty and that the German government states this clearly at the same time that says “we are fully with Ukraine”. You can just say “we are with Ukraine up to the russian gas.” But that would just be true not beautiful.
- b112 5y agoTo be fair here, an extra blanket on the bed, a sweater during the day, and everyone could reduce rheir homes to 12C. Massive, massive savings in gas usage... maybe enough for all!
- daneel_w 5y agoBut that's outside, not inside. Even an old building with lesser insulation and double-pane windows will hold a higher temperature when inhabited. Humans radiate more than a few watts. It's not comfortable, it's definitely a health concern, but it's still not 0°C. An anecdote from earlier this winter when the electricity prices peaked in Europe: my girlfriend and I live on 79 sqm in a modern apartment building with triple-pane windows, and because of the landlord being a stingy d*ck we went through several weeks without any heating. During the worst 7-10 days we had a temperature of -4°C outside, but never below 15°C inside. When the temperature rose to 5°C we had about 18°C inside.
- hogrider 5y agoWhat you are saying is you prefer dead ukranians to be slightly uncomfortable in Germany.
- dathinab 5y agoYou know that 90+% of heating in Berlin is Gas based, probably 50%+ of stoves and ovens are gas based. More warm water is also gas based. Numbers are similar for many parts of eastern Germany. For western Germany the a slightly less, but still very high. Gas Germany imports is also re-exported to other countries. Some financially much worse off. You are literally asking Germany to derive a non-small amount of their financially weaker of people of heating, cooking and warm water. And this would not just affect Germany but other EU countries too, destabilizing all of the EU. At the same time it doesn't necessary stop the war, and might even escalate it even. Also many of the alternative sources we could buy gas from don't have the infrastructure to ship it to us fast enough (yet). Worse some of the alternative sources are states like Qatar, which are from a democratic, ethical and cultural point of view worse then Russia, they are just spacial further away... The main objective of the EU is to protect it's citizens and implicitly secondarily democracy. Switching of Russian gas _now_ would fail both. Leading to internally instability we can't afford which would be a perfect presence for the word wide re-emerging fascism. Now that's how it's now, a lot of thinks are already underway to change this. But changes take time.
- agapon 5y agoPeople in Mariupol, Kharkiv and Okhtyrka haven't frozen to death. They have it much harder than Germans would have.